Many different devices contain Internet web browsers capable of displaying web pages, for example, desktop/laptop computers, gaming consoles, and phones. While many of these devices contain browsers, the capabilities of these browsers are vastly different. For example, PC web browsers are generally much more powerful than phone browsers. While PC browsers support a wide range of media/content types (e.g. HTML, GIF, JPEG, JavaScript, CSS, etc.), handset browsers may only support a simpler and smaller subset of content types (e.g. xHTML-MP, PNG, GIF, CSS-MP). Also, most web pages on the Internet today are designed and developed for PC browsers with only a relatively few web pages developed for the phone browsers.
Further, PC browsers can be extended to support additional content types via extensions called plug-ins. First developed by the Netscape browser, and now supported by most PC browsers (e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, etc.), the Netscape Plug-in API allows third party software developers to extend the content type support of a browser by writing software modules that are invoked by the browser when it encounters a content type that the plug-in has registered with the browser to handle. This level of extensibility is rare with phone browsers, and may only appear in high-end handsets. Mass market phone browsers do not have a method that extends their functionality so web pages with content types that the phone browser can not handle will not be displayed properly. Such popular plug-ins that may be affected include Adobe Flash Plug-in, Windows Media Plug-in, Quicktime Plug-in, Real Media Plug-in, among others.
In recent years, multimedia content has exploded onto the Internet scene with many web pages providing video content. There are many different methods to deliver video to web browsers. The different methods can be categorized broadly into one of two categories. The first is media that plays external to the web browser. In this category, an external application (typically a media player) will be launched by the browser and will play the media content. The other category, popularized by web sites such as, YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Yahoo Video, do not require a external application, but rather deliver the video within the web page via a plug-in. Further, these sites allow other web sites (e.g., blogs) to embed the same video within their web pages via the use of a plug-in. The video is delivered from the popular site (e.g. YouTube) to the web browser, but is displayed within another third party web site. This ability to link videos from video sharing sites to any other site has only further spurred the use of video in web sites.
As mentioned above, because phone web browsers typically do not support a Plug-in API, such as Netscape Plug-in API, they can not play videos from these popular sites or sites that embed the videos into their sites. For web browsers not supporting the necessary plug-ins, two prior techniques that make these types of videos available to users include (1) the Manual Identification/Hard Coding method and (2) the Phone Web Browser Friendly Site method.
In the Manual Identification/Hard Coding method, a web site is manually analyzed and the method to extract the video from that particular web site is determined. An intermediary node modifies the access to the video web site and converts the plug-in in the web page to a link to the video. This conversion is hard coded for each and every web site. If the web browser on the phone is pointed to a web site (i.e., YouTube) that does not have this hard coding, then the intermediary node will not be able to identify the video and the handset will not be able to play the video. Furthermore, if an already hard coded site changes the method it uses to retrieve the video for itself, then the previously hard coded method may no longer work.
In the Phone Web Browser Friendly Site method, the same investigation for each site is performed to identify how the site delivers video content. But now this information is used to create a web site that can be accessed by a phone web browser and from which a phone web browser can play the videos. There are currently two types of Phone Web Browser Friendly sites: (1) a website, e.g., m.youtube.com mobile website, conducting a “Phone Web Browser Friendly” analysis themselves and presenting a webpage for phones and (2) an “aggregator” site that conducts “Phone Web Browser Friendly” for several different websites and proves a phone friendly interface to a website that otherwise would not be phone accessible. This method has the same limitations as described in the previous method.
In contrast, the embodiments of the system and method of this patent application can automatically discover media content on a web page without requiring prior analysis of the web site and without having any sort of hard coding performed to access the media This new method and system for identifying media content will greatly increase the number of video sites that can be accessed by phone web browsers without the manual and time consuming step of analyzing individual web sites.